03.05.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 29, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: A David Hockney library, a Gio Ponti flatware collection, a bracelet inspired by Mario Botta, and a brand new collection by two of the founding members of Memphis.

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03.04.16

Sighted

#weseefaces In These Clever Photos of Everyday Objects

When the Swiss-born, Paris-based product designer Miriam Josi started to feel restless with the pressure to constantly create new objects, she decided to collaborate with photographer Corinne Stoll to make something new out of old ones. To assemble the playful totemic compositions featured in their "Common Faces" series, the pair scavenged everyday objects both from their own homes as well as from a neighbor's basement.

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03.03.16

Fair Report

10 Things We’re Looking Forward to at This Year’s Salone del Mobile

When we attended our very first Salone del Mobile fair in Milan a decade ago, we were instantly swept up in the magic of an event that’s served as the epicenter of the contemporary design world since 1961, and that each year packs a 2.5 million square-foot convention center (plus an entire surrounding city) full of everything that's new and next in furniture and lighting, from future classics by mega-brands to prototypes by design-school grads. Here are the 10 things we're most looking forward to at this year's show, which begins April 12.

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03.02.16

Up and Coming

Colorful, Geometric Designs by a German Studio On the Rise

Though Julia Mülling and Niklas Jessen of the German studio Schneid consider themselves makers of all things — from textiles to furniture to the amazing, stackable dishware set above — it’s lighting that fills the majority of their portfolio. Creating a lamp, they say, “feels very free, almost like making a piece of art — where you don’t have to follow the rules like when you design a chair.” So it’s no wonder that when we ask who their influences might be, they don’t first cite Ettore Sottsass or some other member of the Memphis Group who could have inspired their colorful, totemic Junit series, but rather light artists like James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson. “When you see their art, you realize how affected you can be by the use of light and color,” Mülling says. “That’s very inspirational to us.

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03.01.16

Studio Visit

Beautiful, Textured Wall Hangings By the Los Angeles Studio All Roads Design

Janelle Pietrzak has made a name for herself as a Los Angeles-based textile artist and one half of All Roads Design, the creative studio she runs with boyfriend Robert Dougherty. It’s fair to say her thickly textured woven wall hangings helped usher in the trend; in Pietrzak's distinctive work, abstract fields of color and looping yarns meet shaggy, silky fringe in pieces that are warm and fuzzy yet elegant.

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03.28.14

What They Bought

Local Made at Space Ninety 8

When The Future Perfect abandoned its original Brooklyn location last summer, we thought we might never feel the need to shop on that particular block of Williamsburg again. The Future Perfect's gorgeous digs got turned into a Gant, and for years we've felt we were a little too old for American Apparel. But come next Thursday, we'll be making that trek on the L train again: Urban Outfitters is opening a concept shop on North Sixth Street called Space Ninety 8, complete with rotating gallery spaces, a restaurant, a rooftop bar, and, of course, clothing. But the draw for us will be located smack in the front window. That's where a showcase called Local Made will take place, curated by Urban's director of brand relations and special projects Marissa Maximo, who scoured the borough, commissioning exclusives from some of our favorite designers.

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02.29.16

Shopping

Colorful Kitchen Accessories by the Designer Behind Your Favorite Brand

If you've ever lusted after many of Hay's simple but colorful accessories — from the ultra-covetable Strike matches to the duotone Analog clock — you have Shane Schneck to thank for that. The Swedish-American designer, along with his wife Clara von Zweigbergk, has for years created products and headed up the art direction for the Danish brand from his studio in Stockholm. Now, Schneck is bringing his finely tuned eye to another Scandinavian-chic housewares brand: Ommo, a colorful kitchen accessories collection that's debuting in the U.S. this week.

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02.26.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sculptural Vases With Scholarly Origins

Among our 30-something friends, collaging is suddenly all the rage. (Maybe it's the new adult coloring book?) But to our minds, there's another use for old books and papers that consistently produces a far more beautiful result: paper pulp, the key ingredient in CHIAOZZA's charming Lump Nubbins, Silo Studio's PPPPP bowls, and now Ben Branagan's Monuments series, which debuted last night in a window installation at London's Darkroom concept shop. For the exhibition, Branagan, a designer and professor in visual communications, transformed the pulped remains deaccessioned library books into a series of totemic, distinctly non-functional pots and vases.

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02.24.16

Up and Coming

Erika Emerén is Doing Magical Things With Concrete

Swedish designer Erika Emerén's current practice involves dyeing and casting concrete in an experimental process that she has very little control over, then using it to make chairs, tables, and soon, lamps too. "The results always vary, especially when I'm mixing different colors," she says. "But that's what I prefer, to make something unique. The that I can't control is what makes the design interesting."

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02.23.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Stools That Channel Our Favorite Modernist Sculptors

Isamu Noguchi, Hanna Eshel, Barbara Hepworth — these are the masters of marble who came to mind when we first saw French designer Guillaume Delvigne's beautiful new stool series for Tools Galerie in Paris. The young designer — who often does work for companies like Hermes or La Chance — just closed an exhibition there, the inaugural presentation at a brand-new Left Bank space for the gallery. The sculptural, totemic stools — which were inspired by mooring posts — are actually made from several different materials, including bronze, wood, and leather. But stone is the star here, in creamy white Carrera, flecked travertine, and a rich green called Vert Donay.

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02.22.16

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Features the Botanical Decor of Your Dreams

File this one under "why didn't we think of it first?" This fall, Magali Elali and Bart Kiggen of the Belgian online magazine Coffeeklatch — a destination for lovely interviews and photography that's been on our must-read list for years — released a book called Greenterior, which looks at the homes of designers and artists through the lens of their abundant houseplants.

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02.20.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 15, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Unexpected collabs (Issey Miyake x Ittala, La Perla x Walter Terruso), surprise mug subscriptions (Helen Levi, Ben Medansky), and a striking Amsterdam store interior by Framework (pictured).

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02.19.16

Shopping

These Mirrors Will Make You Question the Meaning of Humanity

Chen Chen and Kai Williams's new Mirror Masks for Areaware are clearly just flat slabs of industrially produced glass printed with a few simple shapes. And yet somehow they ooze emotion — that's how strongly our brains are wired to read the feelings that lie behind facial expressions. To underscore that dichotomy, Areaware's art director Elsa Brown hired the up-and-coming Brooklyn artist Carson Fisk-Vittori to take the mirrors to Mexico City, then shoot evocative photographs of them in various settings around town.

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